Democratic State Senator Gary Siplin of Orlando is term limited and has his eye on the new Congressional district being drawn as part of the decennial redistricting process. The Prayer Bill (oh, okay; “inspirational message” bill) – SB 98 – that he has sponsored is a truly useless jot of pandering trash. It is wrong-headed, inept, unnecessary, and doomed to legal oblivion. It may however garner national news coverage as another unbelievably idiotic thing coming out of Florida. It just passed the Florida Senate 31-8.
The bill text is much less than a page, but it seems to address the ever-popular concern that restoration of school prayer will make schools effective places of learning once again. This is traditional seat-of-the-pants logic that one can hear even from the irreligious who believe that big government has silenced the plaintive voice of faith from the public arena. Never mind the over 600 houses of worship in Marion County, if there isn’t prayer in public schools (and preceding Marion County Commission meetings) then God (God!) is apparently stymied from allowing success to occur.
And prayer is cheap, much cheaper than actually funding schools and public services.
Yes, anytime you stitch together religion and politics, it forms a pander zone. Nothing useful will be accomplished. Yet a politician will score points on an emotional issue that is inseparably attached to citizen heartstrings, and is sure to provide billable hours for constitutional lawyers enabling the courts to declare that government cannot be the vehicle for the establishment of religion, like the US Constitution says.
The Siplin Panderama starts as a law that empowers local school districts to act on the basis of this law and thereby incur all of the legal costs once they’re sued as they most assuredly will. Ask Dixie County officials how things worked out for them, and be sure to inquire how much the über-fail Liberty Counsel has billed them.
Then the Siplin bill takes the rather ridiculous angle that if a school official has absolutely nothing to do with the students selected, the choice the students make about whether to have an “inspirational message,” or the content of an “inspirational message,” it will somehow be nifty okey-dokey for a student to opt to give a Christian prayer at a school event. Or a Muslim prayer. Or a Jewish prayer. Or a Wiccan prayer. Or a Ba’hai prayer. Or an inspirational message that quotes Joseph Goebbels or the Ku Klux Klan. You may now be seeing why a school is going to want/need to have editorial authority at the least.
The reason the school wants (and should have) such authority is because there is no constraint on adults outside the school’s influence to do something contemptible, stupid, racist, or whatever. Such adults range from parents to pastors to politicians to Uncle Billy the Nazi. Kids get the darnedest ideas and say the darnedest things. And they get a lot of that idiocy from their parents, family members, neighbors, classmates, the internet, Facebook, and other dubious sources.
Why should the school care anyway? The bill assumes that the school doesn’t need to have any responsibility.
The crux of the matter is that when a school sponsors an event, it is responsible for what happens at that gathering. A simple bright line is whether the school would be held liable for an injury, for example. If school insurance would cover it, the school is sponsoring that event.
If the school is sponsoring the event, the school cannot allow it to be or become a platform for the promotion of any religious viewpoint or religious practice without violating the US Constitution’s establishment of religion clause. Period.
If parents want to pitch in and have a reception for graduating seniors, and school officials are nothing more than guests, they can have a prayer meeting and animal sacrifices (code permitting) for that matter. It’s a private event.
Siplin’s election year grandstand pandering is a complete waste of time, and potentially a colossal waste of taxpayer dollars for any school or district that adopts such a wrong-headed policy. Yes, more pandering at the local level is always possible … nay, inevitable.
The Florida Senators – mostly GOP – who voted to pass this distraction and abomination should be shamed for their disdain for the US Constitution.
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